Day 53—Wednesday, March 3rd
Coffee Shop Bar
Okay, I have to admit to being completely in a bad mood and grumped to the fucking gills right now. I’m still at work and it’s getting late. Nothing has gone right tonight at work and I’m putting in over a twelve hour shift. I’m afraid the bar I originally chose may be closed by the time I get there. It’s always dicey after 1:00 in the morning, because even if you call, if it empties out all the sudden, they usually shut the joint down on weeknights. I don’t want to waste the time or the cab fare, plus I’m tired and I”m really not in the mood to do this.
There’s a bar right down the street from where I live that’s always open til 4am. That’s the good news. The bad news? It’s the Coffee Shop Bar. I haven’t been in this place in quite some time, in fact I reviewed it for my “99 Beers Off The Wall” book years ago and I didn’t give it a very good review. Okay, I gave it a horrible review. The people that come in here are pretentious and act like they’re all that and they’re really just a bunch of fucking losers, drowning their sorrows because they’re not on some vapid-ass reality show. Again, I haven’t been inside this joint in a long time, but I walk by it almost everyday and I don’t think much has changed. Most of the people I see going in make me want to puke right in my left boot. But due to the time of the night, I don’t have an alternative, so let’s go. Hopefully it won’t be that bad.
Here we are, the Coffee Shop Bar. One of the things I hate about this place is the name itself. It doesn’t make sense, sure they sell coffee in here, but it’s a fucking bar, not a coffee shop and it’s not even set up to look like a coffee shop. It would be like calling a coffee shop, The Bar Coffee Shop and then the shop has fuck-all to do with bars. I’m pissed off already and I haven’t even set foot in this fucking joint. I mentioned I’m in a really bad fucking mood, right?
Oh; boy, already I’m greeted with a jerk-off vibe in this place, bad techno music is playing and I wish I wan’t in here. And what’s going on with her? Is she trying to get everyone to look up? There’s two bartenders on duty one a good looking brunette woman and a bald pretty boy. Just my luck I get the bald pretty boy. I have to confess, he was nice enough, but I still didn’t feel like going through my 365 spiel with him. I’ll start with some of the people in the bar after this beer.
(Five minutes later.) Alright fuck this, I’m outta here. I know the rule is I’m supposed to have three drinks, but I’m bending the rules because I’m so fucking pissed off right now, I’m afraid I’m going to go off on someone and wind up in jail. I was here for a half an hour and that’s the equivalent of spending an eternity in a hot little saloon I like to call hell. Here’s what really tripped me from being in a bad mood to being in a mood so god-awful horrific that I wanted to rip the liver out of every prententious prick in this shithole and serve it up with some fava beans and a nice chianti. What happened was I was going to try and take some pictures of some people and make something usable out of this visit. I saw a woman standing near the yellow phone booths outside of the bathrooms and approached her. She was a brunette with a 70’s style Jane Fonda shag hairdo with too much makeup and it was obvious she can’t hold her booze. She looked pretty fucked up. I went up, took out my card and said my usual spiel I say when I ask someone to take their picture. I gave the her a card and said, “Hi, I’m going to 365 bars in 365 days and I’m documenting it with pictures from the bar and people inside it, could I take a picture of you?”
And with this, she puts her hand up in the air and drunkenly says, “No pictures!” Like she’s the female version of Sean Penn. So I laughed and said, “Hey, settle down, it’s not like I’m the paparazzi.”
And she drunkenly replies, “You could’ve fooled me!”
This fucking drunken hosebag thinks that a member of the paparazzi would be tailing her sorry inebriated ass? How fucking delusional can you get? “No pictures!” What the fuck? She should be thanking heaven and all it possesses that I even asked her, it’s the closest to any kind of microscopic fame this sorrowful excuse for a human shit-sack will ever come. I mean take a look in the mirror, sister, it’s way after midnight, you’re drunkenly teeter-tottering near the fucking bathroom and you have the fucking nerve to say, “No pictures!” What a fucking cunt! And outside of joking around, I don’t throw that word out describing a female very often, because 99.9 % of women do not deserve to have that word flung at them. But this fucking delusional airhead definitely does. “No pictures!” Fuck you! Remember the Bob Dylan record, “Blonde on Blonde?” This broad is “Cunt on Cunt.” Fuck it, I’m getting the fuck out of here, I’ll drink my beers at home. I really cannot fucking take it anymore. Fuck her, fuck this place, fuck, fuck fuck. My head’s about to explode!
Aaaahh...back home with my good friend Mr. Bud Weiser. Serenity now! Goodnight everybody!
Review
Here’s the original review of this shithole I wrote for my book, “99 Beers Off The Wall” back in 2002:
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There’s a massive, sprawling curly-que wooden bar in the middle of the Coffee Shop Bar with booths off to one side, tables and banquettes for eating lunch and dinner off to the other and another, smaller bar in the back. So the good news is, there’s usually a good shot at snaring a seat somewhere. But as we all have realized by now in our sorry-ass lives, when there’s good news, very often bad news is right around the corner waiting in the wings, ready to pounce. Such is the case here. This joint is loaded with attitude, mainly from the pretentious crowd that populate this place—which by the way resembles a coffee shop about as much as a giant brand new, sparkly, corporate Barnes and Noble book store resembles the beaten up, yet charming corner newsstand. The majority of the crowd here is young women who are wannabe models and actresses and sleazy guys in phony Wall Street and agent type mode. Basically the scene in here is this: The wannabe model is fed a line from the phony agent guy promising a photo shoot here, a screen test there. They go home, have sex and in the morning when the designer drugs have worn off and they’ve sobered up, they realize that they’re both losers. Good looking losers, but losers all the same. The wannabe model becomes a high priced hooker and the phony agent guy gets lucky the next night by telling some crack whore he can get her an audition for the next edition of Survivor. Oh, I saw Susan Sarandon having lunch in here once. She’s not here today.
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I stand by my original review.
No pictures? FUCK YOU!
Coffee Shop Bar
29 Union Square
212-243-7969